SILER CITY — Officers in Siler City’s police department have completed a training course focusing on ensuring fair and equitable policing across the community.
Police Chief Mike Wagner said each officer in his department has completed coursework from Fair and Impartial Policing, an organization focusing on teaching officers about recognizing their own biases when out in the line of duty. Training took place over a full day and included interactive exercises.
“Fair and impartial policing is a renown, scientific approach that’s used by departments all across the country,” Wagner said. “It’s a systematic approach recognizing that, as humans, we have a bias, and it’s good to understand that dynamic the human psyche so we can eliminate it from our policing methods.”
Lt. Andrew Freeman of the Siler City Police Department was enrolled in the same training last year and played a role in implementing the training for the entire department this year. He said the training opened his eyes to biases he didn’t realize he had.
“It was a different type of training than I had ever been to,” Freeman said. “It was interesting to see how biases work and recognizing those biases so you can adjust how you approach people and dealing with them in this line of work. It was an eye-opening experience.”
One of the training examples given, he said, involved an active shooter incident in Las Vegas. One officer was responding to a call from two others who had been ambushed by an armed individual. The officer assumed the shooter was a white male, since 54% of shootings are committed by white males.
Freeman said the officer went to the site where the shooter was and started looking for an armed white male. When he arrived on the scene, however, he was surprised to find a white woman toting the firearm.
“When he saw the white female, he never associated her as being a threat,” Freeman said. “It was she and her husband who had ambushed the officers.”
This story stuck with Freeman because there was a similar incident which occurred in Siler City.
While the Siler City case didn’t involve an active shooter, it did involve an armed individual. Officers were called to McDonald’s after a subject armed with a gun tried to climb through the fast-food establishment’s drive-thru window.
When the officers pulled up to the scene, the car with the suspect took off. Officers didn’t have identifying information for the suspect, so Freeman said the two responding officers assumed the armed individual had to be a male.
“They assumed it was a male because, not too often, females are not going to crawl through a window with a gun,” Freeman said.
Officers were able to locate the vehicle with the suspected armed individual, where they found a couple — a male and a female. The driver, a Black male, was pulled from the car and interrogated by police. The female, who was white, was asked to go stand with the deputies while officers continued to question the driver.
What officers failed to notice was the female was the one who was holding the gun.
“Going back and watching the dash cam video, you can see her pull the gun out of her pocket and then put it in her hoodie,” Freeman said. “Going back and watching that, hearing that guy’s story from the class and seeing it in real time here, it was a really eye-opening experience for a lot of us.”
Wagner said by having his officers take this course, he hopes they can bring more equitable policing to the Siler City community and in turn, build trust with the people the department serves.
“It is any police department’s goal to make sure their staff does everything they can do to deliver fair and equitable services,” he said. “When we take our personal biases out of the equation, then that delivers fair, equitable and respectful policing.”
According to the police chief, it’s critical officers are able to recognize their own biases when they are responding to calls. For Wagner, “fair policing” creates respect from the community, which is crucial to effectively protecting the community.
“In today’s world, our community demands that type of policing,” Wagner said. “It’s not a want or a need — it’s a demand from our community that any time they have interaction with our law enforcement that we’re going to listen to them, we’re going to tell them what we can and cannot do and we’re going to explain to them the expectations of whatever issue they may have.”
Reporter Taylor Heeden can be reached at theeden@chathamnr.com.